The heavily anticipated "Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis," which opens Saturday at the de Young Museum, does not disappoint. It will remind visitors how great artworks can unstring our sense of time.

For instance, Johannes Vermeer's mid-17th century "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - the signature work of the show and of its lender, the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague - inspired a best-selling novel and a Hollywood movie in recent years. Yet despite the painting's age, despite the heavy case work that secures it at the de Young, we and "The Girl" seem to inhabit a common time in a way that its mere physical survival cannot explain.

In some respect, we and Vermeer (1632-1675) apparently share a vision - of humankind, of painting's fulfillment as an art, of their peculiar co-evolution.

Many items in the de Young exhibition - still lifes by Willem Heda, Adriaen Coorte and Rachel Ruysch, a landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, a genre picture by Gerard Ter Borch - hint at the thought of realist painting as the precursor, even the progenitor, of photography, one of the defining technologies of our age.

The inner light and descriptive precision of various paintings also seem to forecast the 19th century "luminist" landscapes and trompe l'oeil paintings that many commentators justly view as anchoring a distinctly American vision.

Golden Age

The Netherlands in Europe's 17th century so-called Golden Age had a secular government, shadowed by religious tensions, a growing mercantile middle class and an art market that foreshadowed those we like to think of as peculiarly modern. The Dutch patrons who commissioned and collected the paintings in the exhibition prized their artifice over their factuality.

Art's power to reorder time and transcend it, in contrast to life's inevitable transience, is a theme that resurfaces throughout the show. We see it most movingly perhaps in Rembrandt's late "Portrait of an Elderly Man" (1667), which some may see as an oblique self-portrait. The exhibition design contrives its own echoes of the transience of life by placing "Elderly Man" nearby a youthful "Portrait of Rembrandt With a Gorget" (1629 or later), once regarded as an autograph work, now judged a gifted, but unidentified, pupil's copy.

In the second room of the exhibition, its walls a Mars violet like those of the first, two still lifes by Pieter Claesz, made three years apart, are hung juxtaposed and set up a kind of before-and-after interchange.

The dark 1627 picture shows a candle burning down in a shiny brass candle holder, its flame reflected in a half-full glass goblet. Books sit in the background and at the front edge of the table, an open almanac with spectacles resting on it. The almost palpable warmth of the candle, the rhyming of its light with the books' and almanac's promise of guidance, and the pince-nez's promise of sight leading to insight all make a viewer feel included.

The intimations of mortality and futile striving in this picture turn positively trouncing in the 1630 one. Here a human skull and femur surmount books whose pages look tattered with age and use. The smoke of an expired candle curls above a tipped-over glass, while a watch and its key give time tangible presence. The viewer's vantage point almost feels posthumous.

Giving life

Both paintings offered Claesz numerous opportunities to show his skills at giving life to an image, and the experience of seeing it.

But the aspect of time reordered by art emerges also in an ostensibly realistic picture such as Rachel Ruysch's "Vase of Flowers" (1700), in which flowers of different seasons appear to have blossomed in concert, making the great bouquet an arrangement in time and imagination.

Because 17th century collectors of these pictures understood their rhetoric without explanation, as well as the iconography of a "history painting" such as Rembrandt's "Susanna" (1636), artists of the time felt no need to title their works. The titles attached to them come mainly from descriptions in records of property or sales. So "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - the painting - might have had in Vermeer's mind none of the sort of romance that we attach to it.

Perhaps the unidentifiability of the young woman who sat for it is its most truthful aspect. In any case, her presence - like the exhibition as a whole - remains electric.

Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis: Opens Saturday. Through June 2. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600. www.deyoungmuseum.org.